le sigh

All the Shadows of the Rainbow by Inanna Arthen.  We all know my strong feelings about paranormal stories that don't conform to established rules for the species under discussion.
This is the third book in a series.  The writing is good enough, and the author makes it easy enough to pick up the story... I'm just not sure why anyone would want to: there isn't anything engaging or mesmerizing in the beginning, nothing to grab new readers.

On a Day Without Warning: A Work of Historical Fiction by James D. Fox.  I include the subtitle because, although it is more a descriptor (like "a novel" on covers), it appears on both the cover and the title page.  However, I think it inaccurate because I have the working definition that "historical fiction" means it would be before the lifetime/conscious memory of a majority of readers.  Events from the early 2000s are therefore not historical fiction, even though it happened in the past.  Am I the only one?
The author is going for an emotionally-engaging opening chapter, but he does not have the strength for this big a scene; this makes it not a strong start.
Terrible, horrible, terrible punctuation.  I was groaning before the bottom of the first page.  The writing in general is poor: stilted, unnatural dialogue and not enough sentence variation. 

Kismet or Kamasutra by Martha Rather. 
Very little sentence variation in length or structure.
This story tells: it relates so much history for characters and focuses on how people look and what they wear.
So, so very many exclamation points.  Let the story convey emotion, not the punctuation.
Organization not always clear.
If this is book 3 of the series, which begins int he present and tells a story that began 2 years ago, what could books 1 and 2 possibly be about?  Based on this, I can't imaging how this series is organized.

Deadly Diamonds by John F. Dobbyn. 
This reads like it's part of a series.  The author does a good job of helping the reader jump in, but there are a few too many characters glossed over a little too much.
Pretty good writing, if not always the most true-to-life (main character call his law partner "Mr.", i.e.).  Not ranked, but not bad.  I wish I could have more time with this one.

The Island: Never Will I Leave You by Roberta Kennedy.
Oh so many groans just in the first 2 pages-- terrible punctuation errors (mostly comma errors, but other types as well).  Possible formatting problems?-- so far, every apostrophe missing.
Verb tense problems-- the story is told in the present and uses past to talk about characters' history, but often gets confused and uses the wrong tense.
Facts very poorly woven into the story (... or not, I guess, in this case).  Some paragraphs are more a list of things to know and remember than a vehicle that moves the story along.
Nothing grabbing about the main characters, no reason to care.
Reading this is a complete slog through the terrible writing and punctuation to try to decipher the author's meaning.